Various electronic devices display data on a liquid crystal display (hereinafter abbreviated to “LCD”) or other displaying means. When the amount of data is large enough that the device cannot display all data on the LCD simultaneously, generally a scrolling operation is enabled by which the user can continuously shift the display position of data forward or backward. In order to simplify this operation, many devices display a scroll bar on the LCD with which the user can adjust the display position of data.
One device using scroll bar operations disclosed in Japanese patent application publication No. HEI-6-251061 provides a slider on the scroll bar displayed on the LCD and displays data based on the position of the slider within the scroll bar. Since the position of the slider within the scroll bar indicates the position of the displayed part within the entire data, the user can readily determine where the data displayed on the LCD fits into the overall range of data. This is advantageous because the user can estimate the position of data that the user wishes to view and can display the desired data relatively quickly by operating the slider to select the data being displayed based on the estimated position.
In an effort to improve user-friendliness, Japanese unexamined patent application publication No. 2004-139321 proposes a scroll bar operation device having a function for displaying data corresponding to a specified position on the scroll bar when the user specifies a position on the scroll bar through an input operation. In this way, the user can display data corresponding to a position on the scroll bar by performing a single operation on the scroll bar, without having to move the slider to the position for displaying the desired data.
However, with the conventional scroll bar device disclosed in Japanese unexamined patent application publication No. HEI-6-251061, if the desired data is not currently displayed on the screen, the user must perform a scrolling operation until the desired data arrives in the display, often requiring the user to scroll for a long period of time (through many screens) until the desired data is displayed. Thus, this device increases the amount of effort the user must put forth to retrieve desired data from the entire set of data.
The scroll bar operation device disclosed in Japanese unexamined patent application publication No. 2004-139321 is provided with a function for displaying data corresponding to a position touched on the scroll bar, thereby reducing the amount of scrolling operations required. However, the scroll bar displayed in one screen does not correspond to all browsable data and, hence, there may exist data that cannot be selected (displayed) using the scroll bar in the current screen. If the scroll bar corresponding to the desired data is not currently displayed, in some cases the user may be required to shift the screen several times before the scroll bar displayed in the screen can be used to select the desired data.
In recent years, facsimile machines, printers, and other devices functioning as image processors have become commonplace. Most of these devices are provided with an LCD for displaying images loaded in the device. Images loaded in these devices may be captured by a digital camera or the like and are often numerous in quantity. Generally, the images are converted to thumbnail images (reduced images created from the original images as samples indicating the content of the image data), and a number of the thumbnail images that can fit in the LCD screen at one time are displayed on the LCD. The user can then select a desired image from the total set of images by sequentially scrolling the thumbnail images displayed on the LCD.
However, since the thumbnail images comprise a larger amount of data than ordinary text data, the time required for processing thumbnail images to be displayed is longer, resulting in waiting time between displays. Consequently, scrolling operations proceed rather slowly and can cause the user great stress. In other words, when the data displayed on the LCD are images, operations for scrolling through or changing the display of images on the screen often place a greater burden on the user.